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Okay that is pretty close, and acquired by Google in 2014. So presumably it is possible to be a small CGI shop and use this as your back end. Now I'm wondering if the economics pencil out. Clearly there was something that motivated Google to buy them.

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They work just fine, the product is one of many that's used by shops now. GCP even recently launched a LA region and had an entire day dedicated to the local VFX shops. Nothing stops you from just running a bunch of VMs which many do and they have rolled out the Filestore NFS to make shared disks easier too.

Is that a recent shift? I remember talking to someone from a VFX shop a few years ago, and they made it sound like back then anything cloud was a no-go due to their customers requiring material to stay in-house for fear of leaks.

Recent enough - at a Google event earlier in 2018 it was mentioned that GCP was now compliant with most (if not all) of the major studios’ security requirements.

Yes, smaller studios were early but now the majors like Sony Imageworks are all in. The cloud is a great fit for most of their rendering jobs and security is no different (if not better handled by the cloud).

Here's a session from GCP Next 2018 for cloud render farms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODOJ3UbnV6Y

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